[75 years ago this week, Dewey didn’t defeat Truman—but the 1948 election was close and contested enough that one newspaper famously reported he did. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that election and a few other hotly contested ones (not including 2020, because it really wasn’t), leading up to a special Guest Post from an FSU alum and talented young journalist who would never get it so wrong!]
In yesterday’s
post on the pivotal presidential election of 1800, I made the case for how that
profoundly contested and controversial election very easily could have marked
the end of the nascent American experiment—and how it fortunately and
importantly did not. As I usually do when I start a post with references to another
post of mine, I’ll end this first paragraph here and ask you to check out that
post (if you didn’t read it yesterday, of course) and then come on back.
Welcome
back! While that election of 1800 ended up reinforcing fundamental American
ideas like the peaceful and orderly transfer of political power, it’s certainly
fair to say that it also reveals just how fraught and fragile the electoral
system was in that Early Republic period. A quarter-century later, another and
even more contested and controversial election, the presidential
election of 1824, drove home that point and then some. That
excellent educational resource highlights the main elements to this scandalous
election: due to a variety of factors, the election came down to a group of
candidates from the same political party, the Democratic-Republicans; one of
them, Andrew Jackson, received a plurality (but not a majority) of both the
popular and electoral votes; but when the election was thus thrown to the House
of Representatives (per the
Constitution), another candidate, John Quincy Adams, was elected to the presidency,
possibly due (in the “Corrupt
Bargain” narrative advanced by Jackson and his supporters, at
least) to Adams’
close relationship with Speaker of the House Henry Clay. Whatever
precisely took place in the House, that narrative became a defining one over
the next four years, contributing directly to Jackson’s successful
presidential challenge in 1828.
It’s that
final note that I would say offers a potential and problematic warning for
politics and elections in our own contemporary moment. I want to say this as
clearly as I possibly can: the election of 1824 was unquestionably
controversial, and even if it was on the up-and-up relied on a highly unusual
and quite strange Constitutional quirk to decide the victor; the election of
2020, on the other hand, was ultimately quite straightforward, with one
candidate receiving a clear majority of both the popular and electoral votes. Yet
in the three years since that election, the losing candidate—one who I would
argue bears a striking resemblance
to Andrew Jackson in some clear and disturbing ways (although
there are those historians
who disagree)—and his supporters have been just as consistent in advancing
their own narrative of corruption and cheating and a fraudulent election and
president that need challenging. Whatever did or didn’t happen in 1824, after
all, it was the next four years’ worth of “Corrupt Bargain” narratives that
really influenced the 1828 election—making clear just how fully we have to push
back on our 2023 version of that narrative.
Next
contested election tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
